


Breathe

by DwellonDreams



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But not until Chapter Two:(, F/F, I Write Everything Instead of Sleeping, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, will be korrasami i promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2015-03-16
Packaged: 2018-03-18 02:49:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3553262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DwellonDreams/pseuds/DwellonDreams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Avatar is dead, but the world seems to need her more than ever. What a conundrum. / Or, Korra's airbending is all she has left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breathe

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published on ff.net

"I've already tried my best, I'm afraid, Korra, and there's nothing I can do—"

"Try harder!" It bursts out of her, the white-hot packet of restlessness that had been pulsing in her chest all day. Instead of meeting Katara's quietly disappointed eyes, she glares very pointedly at the corner of the small stone pool.

"Sorry." She practically spits it out.

Onetwothree  _breathe_. Onetwothree  _breathe_. There's about ten beats of silence in which Korra scowls hard up at a whorl in the ceiling, fingers opening and closing reflexively, before Katara gently sighs. "I suppose," she says heavily, "we can always try again."

Korra pulls her lips into a brittle smile to satisfy her old teacher. "Thanks, Katara," she manages to say, and then sinks down into the pool, feeling a silky sweep of water spill over her as she did so and briefly entertaining the idea that the reflexive movements of her fingers had brought it about.

Spirits, she thinks as Katara's band of healing water shimmers through her body, aches and pains melting along with it, what wouldn't she give to just make the tiniest eddy in the smallest bucket of water…

The healing session is over within ten minutes. Korra's eyes instantly shoot open as she instinctively feels for where her bending used to be, but all she can find is a cool stirring of air.

She groans and tips her head back, resolving to drown in this stupid stone pool that was _supposed_ to be healing her,  _supposed_ to be bringing her  _stupid_ bending back—

" _Argh_." The frustrated noise puffs out through her lips, blowing that annoying lock of hair off of her forehead.

"Patience." Katara's voice sounds as fragile as Korra feels. "Healing takes time."

_Patience, Korra. Be patient, Korra. Now, don't be so impatient, Korra. Remember your patience, Korra_. Some of the old fire flares once more as the familiar words told to her so many times over the past couple weeks slide into her brain, and she arcs her hand down in a sweeping motion, coaxing a strong gust of wind that sends droplets soaring and splattering out of the stone tub.

Katara says nothing.

Face fixed in a stormy glare, the waterbender— _airbender_ —flings herself out of the tub, toweling her hair until it had dried out to a mat of frizz, and walks in cool, quick steps over to the window. Outside, the younger children play, tag and hide-and-go-seek and waterbending snowmen after each other but mostly running around in an incoherent, laughing, mindlessly joyful brew. One little girl falls and skids a long way, but ignores the long scratch down her leg and throws herself once more into the brawl. She is laughing so much and so hard that the whole area around her seems to be illuminated by a nimbus of carelessly elated, wild light.

Onetwothree _breathe_ , onetwothree  _breathe_.

"Are you going to the Glacier Spirits Festival?" Katara asks, apprehensively eyeing her with a wary blue eye.

Korra feels the edges of her mouth twist as if she had just sucked on a lemon. She sullenly scuffs at a loose pebble on the floor with her bare foot. "Mmmn. Maybe."

Katara quietly begins to drain the tub. "Your uncle's ship should be here right about now."

"Yeah?"

"His scary children too."

The warmth of a giggle stirs briefly in her chest, but after realizing this was a deliberate ploy to make her laugh, she forces it down.

But Katara is more stubborn than Korra would have given her credit for. "Maybe your friends will go with you to the festival."

"No." Korra says flatly. "They'd be back in Republic City by now." She doesn't think she could bare it—she briefly imagines Mako on one side of a table, and her on the other, the frozen, unreturned  _I love you_ hanging inbetween them like a barrier, she imagines Bolin chatting away obliviously to nothing, she imagines Asami's concerned emerald eyes and the fragilely spoken words, as if Korra were glass. A wind swirls somewhere in the pit of her stomach and around the room, loosely tousling her messy hair.

No, she couldn't do it. Not for an instant. She'd break down, just like she had on that icy cliffside three months ago, she would show weakness—she was supposed to be the Avatar, but all she had left now was her pride. She'd cling to that like it was her life vessel.

The last  _swoosh_ of bubbly water gurgles down the drain, and Katara stands to join her by the window.

"You're lucky, you know," she says conversationally.

She's taken aback for a second. " _What_?"

"You're still a bender, aren't you?"

Korra remembers what the leader of the White Lotus had said when she'd told him the same thing, lips downturned in disapproval and face like frost, ridged with disappointment. "The world's got a thousand benders," she replies bitterly, "But only one Avatar." She watches her face contort into an unrecognizable scowl in the window. "Now we don't even have that anymore—"

"Can you go into the Avatar State?"

The question's abrupt, and it catches her off-guard. Her face falls into her hands before she even knows she's answering. "No. No, I-I've been  _trying_. I've never done it before. How can I go into the Avatar State when right now I only can bend  _one_ element?" Frustration seeps into her words like cracks spreading into glass, but Katara still places her thin fingers soothingly on her shoulder. Katara had always been unafraid of Korra's temper, even when she was a little girl and prone to setting things such as Katara's favorite rug on fire when she got angry.

"Maybe it's not as impossible as you think," Katara begins, ever optimistic. "Avatars have been known to go into the Avatar State without having mastered  _any_ of the elements. These things just take time."

_Time_. Her worst enemy. Because time was always against her, wasn't it, keeping her stranded at the South Pole, helpless, handicapped, while Republic City struggled to dig itself out of Amon's ugly whirlpool of destruction, the lack of benders and the loss of a police chief dragging the city to its knees, without the Avatar to pull it back up, keep the balance—

_Breathe._ Her teeth begin to worry at her ragged fingernails again. It's an unfortunate habit that she's picked up in the last couple months.

"Tell me," Katara says, "that you'll at least  _try_."

Korra closes her eyes.

"Fine, then," she says feebly, trying to throw some of her old breezy confidence back in her voice. "I'll give it a shot."

* * *

Well. It wasn't  _exactly_ a lie.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Korra would wake up, heart thudding a rapid, staccato rhythm against her ribcage with dreamlike shreds of a man in a mask and Mako on his knees and a thumb on her forehead lingering at the edges of her vision and feel something burn restlessly underneath her skin. Her fingers would flex automatically, like they did when she was bending, as something inside of her pulsed insistently with her heartbeat, warming her skin and reminding her of the days when the fire had constantly pumped through her veins. Intangible voices whispered at the corners of her mind, but when she tried to focus on them, they slithered away. Some nights, the insistent burn was so hot she was sure that she'd look down to find black char withering deep into her skin.

The true Avatar State emerged once you had mastered all four elements. She had been told that countless times since she'd discovered, as a young waterbender, she was also able to bend fire. And so she had. She could feel the Avatar State inside her constantly, like an unscratchable itch, but it was blurry and hazy and if she tried to focus on it the itch would seal right back up. She half-listened to her past lives' insistent murmuring, but when she turned her full attention to them the voices scattered and vanished.

The Avatar State was still inside her, and that gave her hope. But she didn't dare tell anybody about it—it would jinx it somehow. And besides, she thought that night gloomily before blowing out her candle and sliding into her stiff, unfamiliar bed, what was hope was there at all when she was an Avatar without her bending?

That night, she couldn't feel the pulse at all. Just her own heartbeat and the waves shattering against the jagged shores.

* * *

"Hello there." His steps click steadily towards her off of the smooth icy pathway. "You wouldn't happen to know the way to the Glacier Spirits Festival, would you?"

_Head down, head down, head down. Onetwothree_ breathe _,_ Korra—

She gently adjusts the smooth curve of her parka hood over distinctive electric blue eyes. "No, sir." She addresses the ground. "I'm sorry."

She can feel Unalaq's baleful gaze wrapping around her like a vice. "Hmmm." Her uncle says, voice practically  _dripping_ with suspicion. His arms fold across his chest. "Well, at any rate, it's not an appropriate time for a young lady like yourself to be out and about, no? I'll help take you home, if you don't mind."

Korra instinctively takes a step backwards. "Thank you, sir, but it's no trouble," she trills, trying to slightly heighten her voice. "I can find my own way home."

Unalaq's lips purse disapprovingly. "Nonsense." He reaches out to her.

Well, nothing else to do now. Korra swirls around and attempts to make a run for it, marginally slipping on the slick stretch of ice—

But Unalaq's foot catches her trailing cloak, and it glides off of her to crumple on the ground, leaving her cold, exposed, and apparent.

For a millisecond, her breath freezes on her lips. She slowly pivots and struggles for a smile. "Er, hi there, Uncle."

Unalaq's false smile comes to him much more easily. "Korra, you must know that after all these years even  _you_ can't hide from me. Have I stayed away for so long?"

Korra lets out a long breath she wasn't even aware that she was holding and slumps over in a posture of defeat with her hands stuffed sullenly in her pockets, manners be damned. "Guess so," she mutters. "Can I have my cloak back, please, Uncle?"

To Unalaq's credit, he doesn't ask her for what purpose the cloak was serving, but to dock off those newly earned points his booted foot is still resting firmly on the long black cloth. "Why the rush? I haven't seen you in years, the least I could do is offer you some warmth and shelter for the night." He bends down to pick up the cloak, but keeps the dark folds imprisoned like silky waterfalls inside his fingers. "Come by the house that your father has  _graciously_ provided for my children and I. I'm sure I have some tea leaves left from our voyage."

Korra can't say that she's ever been on the trapping end of her uncle's famed weaselly words, but it isn't a nice experience. She'd been hoping to visit the Glacier Spirits Festival under the enjoyable darkness of disguise—after all, she had never missed it in all her seventeen years and though she  _certainly_ wasn't taking any of Katara's advice, maybe the gaudy lights and the constant cacophany of laughter and the feeling of losing yourself in a giddy swirl of elation that usually accompanied the festival would lift her mood just a tad.

But as she avoids her uncle's prying ice-needle-razor eyes, Korra's certain that this is the universe's way of telling her that she's not the Avatar anymore, doesn't deserve these childish illusions.

She'd given up her right to them, hand-in-hand with her bending.

"All right, then." It slides clumsily off of her tongue, conflicted by the snappish  _fine_ she wanted to toss at him.

"Good girl. Come, now, it's getting cold."  _It's the South Pole, you idiot, of course it's fucking cold._

_And I'll take my cloak back_ , she adds to the bitter stew in her head, swiping it out of his fist the moment he turns.

* * *

"I'm sorry for not coming to visit sooner, truly, I am." A weak fire sputters underneath the porcelain belly of Unalaq's tea kettle, embellished with the crest of the Northern Water Tribe. "Especially with my niece being the own Avatar, and all—" He raises his teacup to her in a small toast, surveying her with a vaguely fond smile. Korra sits silently in the armchair across from her uncle's, face straining as she fought the urge to glare furiously. It wasn't Unalaq's fault he had placed her next to the blazing hearth. "—I do still regret not being there for your waterbending training." With a smooth flick of his hand, a river of water flows out of a nearby jug and rushes neatly underneath the kettle, putting out the fire. He elegantly lifts the kettle off the counter and pours a new generous surplus of tea into his own cup. "Mmmn. Delicious. How  _is_ that going, by the way? Your Avatar duties."

_Onetwothree, onetwothree_. Korra takes a long, slow sip of her own tea, ignoring the scalding flow of heat over her vulnerable taste buds to avoid answering.

"Unless, of course—" Unalaq's teacup  _chinks_ back onto his saucer as he gives her the full ice of his gaze, "the rumors are true."

The fire splutters in its grate as Korra forgets how to breathe. Her fingers absently flex around the teacup handle, and a strong gust of wind around their ankles is Unalaq's answer.

_I can airbend!_

Unalaq's upper lip wrinkles. For the merest second of a second, Korra sees a slight smear of contempt daubed on his face, but in the next second it is gone.

"I'd feared as much." He slides his saucer onto the counter and sighs, long and loud, lacing his fingers into his lap. "You see, Korra, I admittedly did not come here just to watch the spirits be mocked in a childish carnival."

He looks at her as if he expects her to say something.

"Huh. Yeah. Right," she offers weakly.

"I actually came here for a favor. From the  _Avatar_."

_You're the Avatar_ , a golden-eyed boy had once said,  _and I'm an idiot_.

The Avatar—

An  _idiot_ —

_I'm the Avatar. And I'm an_ idiot _._

"Yeah? What sort of favor?"

Unalaq waves a nonchalant hand outside, toward the swirling masses of snow and the diamond-paned glass windows. "Did you know, Korra, that a long time ago spirits used to dance in the sky of the South Pole, just as they do for the North?"

Before Korra can say anything more than  _nope_ , he stands and strides over to the window, gazing out over the smattering of villages with a keen, hungry look applied to his razor-sharp face.

"During the hundred-year war, the Southern Water Tribe was thrown out of balance, and the lights of the spirits vanished. Instead of dancing in the sky, they are now swirling in a gigantic storm called the Everstorm, bringing nothing but chaos to the Southern Water Tribe."

"And what could the Avatar do about that?" As he turns back toward her, Korra takes another draught of tea to calm her jangling nerves.  _Onetwothree, onetwothree_.

The Avatar is dead, but the world still seems to need her. What a conundrum.

"The spirits are restless because the Spirit Portal of the Southern Tribe has been closed for thousands of years—well, as the Avatar, you should know this better than anyone, but the Southern Portal  _must_ be open in order for there to be balance."

His hands lock on either side of the arms of Korra's chair, and he stoops down to face her. "Only the Avatar can open the portal."

Korra holds his ice-tipped gaze for as long as she can, then finishes off the dregs of her tea. "You know, I'm not sure if you've heard," she said, "but the Avatar's  _dead_."

(The Avatar State suddenly spurts within her, like a white-hot weed, and she starts in her chair, tea sloshing over the side of her cup. Voices flutter anxiously about the edges of her mind, but the moment she turns her full attention to them they dissipate like a candle under a blast of frost, leaving behind a single word trailed in smoke.  _Alive_.)

She does take a little pleasure in seeing shock dilute Unalaq's pupils, before they suddenly flare, wreathed in mixed anger and disbelief.

"Well," he breathes, shoving himself off of the chair in a fluid, elegant motion. The diplomatic front withers off of him like a second skin. "Then you can rot your time here in this winter wasteland, Avatar, for the rest of your life while you neglect your duties. Frankly, I don't care. But for the love of the Spirits, before you moan and complain and stamp your feet out here forevermore, please, do this  _one thing_." His eyes, so frosted blue in comparison to the rage leaching into his face, lock onto hers.

No.

Unalaq was just like the others. He didn't understand, and really, Korra hadn't expected him to. It was just like all of them, to not understand that she had  _lost_ what made her the Avatar, what had taken her thirteen years to master.

All it had taken was the simple press of a thumb. And the Avatar was dead.

Korra stares him back in the face with a sort of calm that she never possessed. "You," she says, tone all glass and steel and platinum, "can't tell me what to  _do_." And she stands and pivots, relishing the feel of her ponytail hastily whipping across his chin as she snatched up her cloak. "See you later, Uncle."

And she makes a run for the door, but not before another lash of her uncle's words, tipped with lethal venom, bites her in the back.

"Even if you claim to no longer be the Avatar anymore, you were once. Surely you  _must_ have  _some_ degree of justice left inside of you?"

Her hands curl into ready fists at her side, ready to turn around and punch,  _fwoosh_ , a roar of fire,  _swipe_ , her uncle's pretty little teaset and ornate rug and that  _smug_ expression, all charred with ash and gone up in flames—

"Or are you so  _blinded_ by your own clumsy errors that you're content to abuseyour duties while the people in the world starve and weep and clamor for their Avatar?"

Korra stood there for one beat. Two. Three. She pressed her lips together, and she practically tore the hood back over her head.

"The world should learn to live without its Avatar. It's going to have to," she bites back.

And Korra disappears into the darkness.

* * *

**.**

**.**

**.**

* * *

_Onetwothree_ breathe,  _onetwothree_ breathe.

_Since when did it become so hard to just_ breathe? Because air is exploding out of her frozen lips in harsh white clouds, quickly being whisked away by the stinging winds wracking the South Pole, but Spirits  _damn_ it, she can't seem to suck a single molecule of air back into her shriveled lungs.

_Onetwothree_ breathe _onetwothree_ breathe.

_Keep going_. A faint whisper tickles the edge of her unconsciousness.  _Don't stop_.

Korra can feel the Avatar State slipping through her veins like silver beads of mercury, like a frozen flower sitting dull and dead in the middle of her chest. A flower refusing to blossom.

_Don't stop, Korra_.

I know, she silently murmurs to the voice stirring at the corners of her brain, I  _know_ , Aang—

_Keep going. Don't stop. Breathe_.

I know. I know. I know. I  _know_.

* * *

_The jangling ditty of the radio had become a constant soundtrack in their little cottage, an endless stream of pro-bending matches and current events. The Fire Ferrets, as predicted, had become her favorite team, and when the match ended (miserably for the Ferrets, who had lost their spark with Mako and Korra) she spun the dial, looking for the news station._

_"—While Republic City and its remaining benders may well rejoice with the terror of Amon now extinguished, we all still have cause to worry. What with the loss of Chief Beifong's bending, the loss of half of our city's beloved benders, and most importantly the loss of the Avatar_ —"

_Korra gives the dial another vicious turn._

_"—Well, Mr. Shinobi, nobody is denying that this has been a disastrous turn of events—Amon may be gone, but his shadow most certainly still remains looming over the city. Take that and combine it with the abounding rumors that the Avatar can only airbend, yes,_ only  _airbend now—"_

_Turn. Click._

_"—I'm not one to listen to gossip, but the stories that I've heard about the Avatar, recently_ —"

_Turn. Click. Turn. Click. Turn. Click._

* * *

Is she even going the right way anymore? When she'd first set out, she had set out with the promising-looking swirling mass of painful pinks and cobalt blues and sickly greens lurking far away in the midnight sky. Now that repeated fists of ice-tipped snow was pounding into her and threatening to tear her off her feet, it was a bit hard to look for what Unalaq had called the Everstorm.

But she tries, anyway. Keeping a blue-gloved hand protectively over her forehead, she glances upward, chunks of dark hair cutting into her vision.

A breathtaking landscape of glaring white stares Korra back in the face. But then again, that's what she gets for venturing out into the South Pole in the middle of the night.

_Use your Avatar instincts_. Tenzin's voice, unwelcome and foreign, creeps back into her head after all these months.  _Use your instincts_.

When was the last time her instincts had been right?

_Try, Korra. Just_ try _._

She lets her eyes slip shut and ever-so-slightly extends her hands from her hips, listening, feeling for something out there.

She sways to her right, attracted by some invisible magnetic pull.

_Use your instincts_.

So she shakes her hair back and yanks her hood back over her head, squaring her shoulders, and for a second she is her old self again.

She sets off in pursuit of the Everstorm.

* * *

_The little girl with the wild, careless elation hanging off of her like a coat is pushed to the ground during one of the children's games and spills to the ground, slipping horizontally across the ice. When she dazily sits up, a deep gash is sliced neatly into her leg, blood sneaking in haphazard cracks along the cut._

_Korra stands from her stool by the window as a watchful parent rushes over and comes to drag the girl away to Katara, and she flexes her fingers before realizing_ oh _._

_The water does not come._

You're not a healer anymore.

_Korra pours the remains of her glass of water into the sink. She doesn't feel thirsty anymore._

* * *

The spirit rushes at her, a long and violent scream trailing behind it, and when she turns around to meet it she's totally unprepared.

" _Oof_!"

The spirit rams into her and sends Korra tumbling across the winter landscape, her precious breath flying out of her every time she slams into the ground. When she hits the ground for the last time, she stays there, struggling to wrench frozen pocketfuls of air from the merciless wind as the dark spirit circles around her, displeased with the invasion of its territory.

_Breathe_.

"Get  _away_ ," she snaps at it. It hisses reproachfully at her, golden symbols flaring in its unreasonable rage.

She turns her back on it.

But when it tries to rush her again, Korra is  _ready_.

She swirls around and meets it with a vortex of wind so powerful that the the winds currently ambushing her are jostled out of the way and that the spirit is instantly repelled. As it shakes itself off and prepares to dive again, she moves like a snake. Punch, punch, punch, _whoosh, whoosh, whoosh_. Just when it looks like the spirit's about to wither away, she turns gracefully in a waterbending move, slashing her leg through the air. The resulting scream of air barrels forward and Korra's surpised it doesn't  _slice_ the damned spirit in half.

Recognizing her as a formidable foe, the spirit screams one more, but sullenly spins away into the windy night.

* * *

_Unalaq's cerulean eyes lock on hers across the table, and he smiles—the same skeletal, diplomatic smile that he had patiently worn for her all through the night when she turned him down._

_He steals the opportunity when her father stands from the dinner table to speak with some excitable inventor with a bespectacled brunette trailing constantly in his wake. He leans gently over to her and whispers, "Have you given any thought to my offer?"_

_Korra stabs sullenly at the penguin meat sitting slumped over in the centerpiece of her plate. She can't think of a thing that looks any less appetizing right now. "I've given it_ lots  _of thought," she says, and slides the penguin meat off her fork with her teeth just in time to give her uncle a huge, winning smile. Unalaq's upper lip slightly contorts at its edges and his own smile becomes oddly fixed._

_She wasn't the Avatar, and you had to_ deal  _with it._

_"I understand that the decision is…difficult," he says, slicing his own slab of penguin meat. "But surely you must have realized by now that I would not ask this of you if it was not your sworn_ duty _."_

_Korra hurriedly glances up at her father. He's still politely engaged with…Vernon, is his name? "Look, I_ have  _given it some thought," she hisses under her breath. "And I know that if it's anyone's job, it should be the Avatar's, but the problem is—"_

_"Exactly," Unalaq cuts her off and leans back in his chair, a satisfied gleam in his eye. "You claim to not be the Avatar, and that might be true. But who else is close enough to the description?"_

_"Look, I can see where you're coming from but—"_

_"But nothing." Unalaq stands in his chair and presses his immaculately folded napkin to his lips before draining off the last of his wine._

_Tonraq holds up a hand to stop—spirits, Vadick? Viktor?—the businessman's torrent of words. "Leaving so soon, brother?"_

_"Yes, if you'll excuse me, brother. I am still quite exhausted from my trip, and my children have already retired."_

_"Well, then, good night." Tonraq reluctantly turns back to face whatever-his-name, and Unalaq bends down over the table to look Korra in the eyes, ice-blue to sapphire._

_"Without the Southern Spirit Portal opened, the Southern Water Tribe will be plagued by the darkness of the Spirits for the rest of time," he quietly said. "Would you like that to be on_ your  _shoulders, Korra?"_

* * *

She manages to fend the remains of the dark spirits off with her airbending, stirring a reckless kind of joy somewhere in a hollow part of her chest that hadn't been filled in a while—the joy of fighting, of  _movement_ , of her own graceful  _skill_ —before she reaches the center of the Everstorm.

The location of the portal turns out to be a practical mass of ice, a place practically dead of the winds that had bullied her all those hours ago, with a pale blue core glowing steadily at its center.

Korra stares it down, her fists opening and closing at her side.  _Onetwothree_ breathe _, onetwothree_ breathe.  _Don't stop_. The voice of a long-dead Avatar peeps from some distant pocket of her mind.  _Don't give up, Korra_.

_Yeah, I know_ , she wishes she could snap back, along with,  _where were you when I was getting my bending taken away?_

She opens her hands once more and lifts them in front of her face. Skinny, brittle fingers that had once held so much power. Weathered palms that could snap the earth along its crust, twist a sheet of water into a razor-ice-whip, punch tunnels of blue flame. Veins that had once pumped with fire.

She would feel so much safer going into the Spirit Portal with the fire back in her veins.

_Onetwothree_ breathein,  _onetwothree_ breatheout. She rotates her neck with a sharp  _cracking_ sound, and reaches her arms out in front of her, stretching, loosening up all the muscles that hadn't been stretched in over a month.

So yeah,  _maybe_ she wasn't the Avatar anymore.

But that didn't mean Just-Korra couldn't do a lot of damage either.

_You're ready, Korra._  The voice tickling the back of her head is as calm and poised as a cool breath of wind.

Well, she has Aang's confidence. That's something.

So she plunges into the twisted mass of ice, fists at the ready and breaths long and easy.

* * *

_Even from several feet away, she can still see Mako's pupils dilate, like ants trapped in amber, at the sight of the white-red mask looming ominously over his face._

_Amon's thumb closes over the center of his forehead._

_She can't breathe. She can't breathe. She can't_ breathe _._

_No, no, you won't take anything else away—spirits damn you,_ monster _—_

_"No!_ "

_A strong course of wind bursts from her desperate fist and sails down the hallway, knocking Amon off of his feet and sending Mako tumbling to the ground, eyes widening in shock as he looks at the Avatar-who-wasn't-the-Avatar as she looks, amazed, at her hands._

_At the power that was still in them._

_"I can airbend!"_

* * *

The floor of the icy cavern looks like it was cut from a sapphire—all gleaming pale facets and smooth-hewn edges. Korra hesitantly shuffles into the open space, her fingers tracing off of the frosted sides of the cave.

A glowing silver sphere, the source of the light in the dark, throbs in the center of the floor. The moment she looks upon it, warmth begins to slide through her frozen system, coaxing feeling back into her goosefleshed arms and legs.

"The Spirit Portal," she whispers to herself, surprised when the words don't come out as a white puff of air.

A symphony of whispers kicks off once more in her brain at the words, spreading from the obscure edges to pervade her mind like a fog. Korra winces and grazes her fingers against her temples, wishing not for the first time that she had the icy numbness that her water healing brought.

Power pulses gently at her fingertips, and encouraged, she glides along the level slickness of the floor until she is standing directly on top of the Spirit Portal, feeling its energy pulse into her toes and pump waves of power through her body like an electric wave, slightly lifting her hair off her shoulders.

She reaches down to touch it.

But something curls around her leg before she can move any farther.

* * *

_The feeling of bloodbending, of somebody seizing her and taking hold, shoots up through her bloodstream like nausea. Her legs immediately cramp up, and her fingers shiver to a slow halt._

_The panic that she'd so_ relished  _seeing in Amon's eyes flattens out to a vague pleasure, and he extends both of his arms to keep her locked in place._

_"No—" She straightens up, spine crackling with the effort. "You—" She cocks her fist behind one ear, entire body trembling. "DON'T!"_

* * *

Korra spins around to face the leering golden symbols of a dark spirit slowly dragging her away from the Portal. As she struggles, beating her fists and attempting to find a hold on the unnaturally smooth floor, a flood of spirits begin flowing in from cracks in the wall and wrap around her, pulling her upwards and away from the portal.

She punches, and she screams, torrents of air threatening to flatten them again the roof, but they're relentless, crazily determined to keep the one human who had wandered in here after so long to disturb their peace.

No. Spirits (of the light, anyway) help her, she would  _not_ be known as the only Avatar to lose her bending and then disappear off the face of the earth without having  _done_ anything—

_You beat Amon_.

That gives her an idea.

"No—you— _don't_!" She frees both hands long enough to punch them out in front of her and send tornadoes roaring at the dark spirits, who manage to scatter and leave her tumbling to the ground just in time.

The constant mumbling in her brain all condenses into one, powerful voice.

_YOU ARE THE AVATAR._

And just before she hits the ground, the Avatar State blooms in her chest, and a roar of power hits her like a tsunami.

* * *

_I told you I would destroy you._

**_._ **

**_._ **

**_._ **

And you  _failed,_ she thinks.

* * *

She stands, hovering in midair, eyes frosted silver and hair crackling with washes of electricity and  _laughs_.

The Avatar State tastes like victory, and in that instant that it spreads cheetah-quick through her veins, replacing the hollow arteries that once held fire with  _lightning,_ she knows that she is the most powerful being on Earth.

The spirits immediately shy away, dissipating into their cracks in the walls and fleeing into the night, and Korra raises her fists in the chair, churning the wind with her strength. And she drives her fist into the glowing sphere trapped beneath the ice, and a green pillar shoots like a burgeoning weed up, up, up, up—

And spirals out into a brilliant array of greens and blues and pinks and golds and silvers, bleeding vermillion and periwinkle into the inky sky, looking like—

Looking almost like—

"Spirits dancing in the sky," she says to herself, and she realizes that she's standing on the floor, irises their normal electric blue, and hair back down in his place.

She looks down at the Spirit Portal, now glistening warm and throbbing steadily like a heartbeat underneath her.

"I did it!" She throws back her head and yells to the dancing skies in a victory cheer. " _I did it_!"

The colors swirling, dancing, up above her wink approvingly down in response.

"I did it," Korra says quietly.

She reclines down on the diamond floor to watch the spirits dance in the sky as they had not for a hundred years.

* * *

"Unalaq!"

She races eagerly into the Southern Water Tribe grounds, excited laughter trailing behind her. "Unalaq, hey!"

Korra had spotted her uncle from the foot of an icy cliff overlooking the Southern Water Tribe. He had been at the top, fingers laced behind his back, his blue eyes flashing as they gazed solemnly over his tribe's southern counterpart.

Without thinking, she had immediately sprinted up to greet him.

"Uncle!"

At that, he turns around, watching her slow to a fast-paced walk with an elated giddiness cloaking her.

He smiles, a smile almost bordering on reality.

"Hello, Korra. I saw what you did last night."

"Yeah! Isn't it great?" She leaps one final pace to face him. "I can go into the Avatar State now! You know what that means, right?" Her smile stretches onto almost dazzlingly bright. "If I can master the Avatar State, you know what's next? Avatar State down, now three elements to go!" She pumps her fists up in the air, expecting for her uncle to congratulate her, pat her on the shoulder, do  _something_ , but instead he smiles thinly and turns around, head bowed and shoulders hunched.

"Uncle? What's wrong?"

He doesn't move.

He doesn't even seem to breathe.

"What are you looking at?"

He shifts marginally to the left, allowing her to come forward and look.

Korra glances warily at her uncle's stiff countenance, but still shuffles carefully forward on the tip of the precipice to take a glance.

Her lips part in shock.

Ships—no, not ships,  _warships_ —are pulling into the Southern Water Tribe harbor, leaving trails of froth in their wake. Troops of soldiers are flooding into the ice-capped city, marching  _one,two,three,one,two,three,one,two,three_. People are running, fleeing, blind to the sight of the spirits dancing in the sky behind the smoke puffing in generous black clouds from the warships.

The warships are marked with the crest of the Northern Water Tribe.

"Unalaq?" Korra turns to face him, fists balling uncertainly. "What's going on? These are your ships."

His lips press together into a skinny, dark slash.

"What are you  _doing_ , Unalaq?" Her voice thickens all of a sudden, laced with danger, and she slightly raises her fist, ready to blow the man off the side of the cliff if necessary.

"Opening the spirit portal was only the first step in getting the Southern Water Tribe back on its righteous path." He turns away from her, chin held high. "There's more difficult work to be done before our two tribes are  _truly_  united."

Korra's mouth twists into something resembling a snarl. So had her father  _really_ been right about his wayward brother, all these years? "You won't do this. You  _can't_." The air stirs powerfully around them, tearing at their clothes and smoothing cool fingertips through their hair.

"But I have." He makes to step away from her, but before he began his nonchalant descent, he stops to drop a whisper in her ear.

"You may think you control the Avatar State, but once again I'm not surprised to know more than you do. The Avatar State is a fickle thing, uncontrollable and unreliable without the mastery of all four of the elements." He leans closer, his breath practically pattering against her ear. "And you and I both know that that tyrant took away your bending for good and that you will never, ever, no matter how hard you try, find it again." Unalaq then moved back, his eyes gleaming and breathing hard. "Now if you don't mind, dear niece, please move aside so I can get through. Or are you going to blast me off the side of the cliff?"

Korra doesn't move.  _Shecan't_ breathe _, shecan't_ breathe _,she_ _can'tfucking_ breathe _._

"As I thought." Unalaq brushes past her. "Goodbye for now, Korra." And he continues down the cliffside, a familiar smile playing at the edges of his diplomatic mask.

The kind that says,  _I win._

"You won't get away with this!" It explodes out of her too late, just as he's halfway down the cliffside. "I'll go back to Republic City, and I'll get the power of the president behind me, and I will  _take you down_ —just like I took down Amon!" Korra's whole body trembles with fury, breath exploding out of her in furious blasts.

Unalaq slowly turns his head. He lets his triumphant grin overtake his frozen features.

"You're an Avatar without her bending, Korra," he says. "As much as you think there is, there is no extra power behind you. You're just a simple airbender now. What can  _you_ do to stop  _me_?"

And Korra stands there, numbly, and watches as her uncle slims out into a formless black dot sweeping gloatingly into her  _tribe_ , her  _home_ , and screams. She churns tornadoes into the cold, still air with the strength of her fury, and forces the water back from the shore with reckless explosions, and melts the snow straight off the side of the craggy cliff with merciless hot blasts, but in the end slumps to her knees, weeping hot tears of what used to be fire down her cheeks.

_I'll get you,_ she swears to herself,  _I'll_ get  _you, Uncle._

_Onetwothree_ breathe, _onetwothree_ breathe.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Glad to see you made it to the end.
> 
> So I originally posted a chapter 2 for this story, but then like two years later decided I didn't like it and took it down, so. I was never going to continue this and I decided that it just worked better as a one shot than two chapters of an unfinished story, so if a single person ever is struck with the burning desire to figure out whatever happened to that unfinished TLOK fic they read that one time and is desperately confused as to where chapter 2 went, this is why. I actually kind of like this, so I might as well keep it up. 
> 
> EDIT: also i deleted the entire first section to this bc i edited it a ton and then sent it into a writing contest lmao, so if it looks incomplete thats why
> 
> thanks for reading:)


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